Ethical Calculus

The Math of Madness

In a previous post, I explained how I created a new scientific field (memetics - the science of spreading ideas) and resolved to use it to make some significant political and cultural improvements in society. For my first major memetics experiment, I decided to help Donald Trump get elected.

There were many reasons for this. Perhaps the most important one was that Donald Trump was an outsider candidate. I have already discussed how my unconventional sciences faced a lot of opposition and mockery from the existing status quo. Sociologists and economists who spent a lot of time and money in academia would never accept that a layman without any of their fancy degrees was smarter than them and had achieved something that they never could. The only way to demonstrate the superiority of my sciences was to show them in action. During most of the election, most experts smugly agreed that Trump had only a 2 to 3 percent chance of winning. What better way to discredit the experts than to show that all of their predictions were wrong?

But my support for Trump went deeper than that. Donald Trump absolutely loathed the establishment elite, whom he often referred to as “the Deep State.” Meanwhile, I was trying to overthrow the dominant scientific paradigm - to humiliate the establishment elite in our current scientific paradigm and prove that they were worthless. I knew that the moment I went public with my sciences, the “experts” would try to discredit and deplatform me, in order to save face for themselves. As the saying goes, if you come at the king, you’d best not miss. I took this maxim to heart. If I was going to remove and replace these establishment elite, I needed to maximize my chances of success before going public. Undermining their credibility beforehand would be a great opening move, and what better way to undermine their credibility than by electing a President into office who hated them? There was a natural overlap between Trump’s goal of political power and my goal of scientific status.

The focus of today’s blog post is to explain my theory about the psychology of voting demographics, the potential exploits and vulnerabilities that this psychological profile creates in the electoral process, and how you can leverage some of these exploits to get your preferred candidate into office.

The most important concept in understanding how an election works is understanding tribalism. Tribalism is a complicated concept to understand in its entirety, but for the purposes of rigging elections, it can best be described as “The tendency of human beings to organize themselves into an ingroup or outgroup (ie, “Us vs. Them”), and support the ingroup at all costs while demonizing the outgroup, in defiance of logic, fairness, and reason.” For example, if you analyze 100 voters and discover that 30 percent always vote for Democrats while 32 percent always vote for Republicans, then we could describe that voter sample as 62 percent tribalist. These are the people who will never engage their rational thought processes on any given political topic: instead, they will simply vote for whomever they perceive as “their team” and oppose the “enemy team.” You can even switch the party platforms and tell them that the opposite party’s politicians made the statements attributed to their party’s politicians and vice versa, and it won’t even matter - they will still find a way to rationalize supporting “their team” and hating the “other team.”

The reason that tribalism is important in elections is because it determines what percentage of the electoral vote is up for grabs. In the example above, where 62 percent of the voting population is tribalist, it means that politicians don’t need to bother courting their votes. Instead, they only need to win over the remaining 38 percent of the voter population. The higher the political tribalism, the more important the remaining voter share is.

Of course, 62 percent political tribalism was just an example. In modern life, those are rookie numbers. Nowadays, I would say approximately 90 percent of the voting population is politically tribalist. This is because of social media algorithms that are optimized to keep voters in an echo chamber of their own opinions, in order to maximize clickbait revenue. The algorithms have learned (quite accurately) that people don’t like being exposed to opinions that differ from their own. If you hate Trump, you’re not going to click on articles that mention any of the good things Trump has done - instead, you’re going to click on articles that tell you he’s a monster who enjoys putting children in cages. And if you hate Obama, you’re not going to click on articles that mention any of his accomplishments; you’re going to click on articles that tell you he’s a member of the Illuminati who participates in satanic rituals. Even though both of these opinions are unfactual and very extreme, and you would probably benefit from some exposure to reasonable opinions from the opposite side, you’re statistically unlikely to click on those opinions, which means less revenue for the social media companies. You may tell yourself that you’re an open-minded person who’s willing to evaluate the evidence and weigh it fairly, but the fact is that most people are not. The algorithms know you better than you know yourselves. The reason that they immerse you in a social media echo chamber that does nothing more than tell you what you want to believe is because deep down, in your heart of hearts, this is what you want. And the social media companies don’t get paid for giving you information that turns you into a better person, they get paid for monetizing your preferences and telling you what you want to hear. You want to hear that you’re a good person who’s right while the other side is made up of bad people who are wrong, so that’s what the algorithms tell you.

This willfully self-delusional aspect of human psychology may be bad news for democracy, but it’s great news for people who want to put their own politicians in office in order to undermine their scientific rivals. That’s because the higher a society scores in political tribalism, the fewer people you need to persuade in order to get your candidate into office. In a society with 62 percent tribalism, 38 percent of the voting block is still up for grabs - which means that you need to peel off 19 percent of the electorate in order to be assured of victory. That’s a lot of voters. But in a society with 95 percent tribalism, you just need to peel off a couple of percent in order to guarantee victory for your side. That’s much easier to achieve. All you need to do is find a few wedge issues for which you know your side can make a much better case to the non-tribalist voters and hammer down on those issues relentlessly so that they suck up all the oxygen in the room. Basically, for the set of undecided voters that you are targeting, you want to essentially turn the election into a referendum on those specific issues where you know you have the advantageous high ground.

In simpler terms, all you need is:

1) A strongly polarizing issue

2) Which you know you’re going to win

3) Calculated to appeal to non-tribal voters

___________Amount of tribalism determines the size of your wedge issue___________

It doesn’t even matter what the issue is, as long as it fulfills the criteria above. It can be something as complex as Zionism, or as trivial as rock-collecting. As long as you have a winning topic, you just have to find a way to work it into every online conversation so that you can dominate the internet with it. Since I’m a bit lazy and didn’t want to manufacture a brand new issue, I hopped online to see if something like that already existed. As luck would have it, there was such an issue, fresh out of the oven and ready to serve to the public with extra servings of outrage. That polarizing topic of debate would eventually come to be known as Gamergate.